International: Arm the Germans?

The West was facing a portentous decision: Should it prepare to place arms into the hands of defeated Germany?

The official U.S. answer to the question, as expressed by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson in the name of President Truman, was a flat no. But by last week it was plain that a more accurate and honest answer would have been: “No—for the time being.” Western military leaders and planners are agreed that some sort of army for the new West German Republic is essential and inevitable. In the face of an East German, Red-armed puppet state, a Western Germany capable of defending itself is necessary to the successful defense of all Western Europe. This view has been forcefully expressed by Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, chief of Western Union’s joint command, and is the opinion of most, if not all, top U.S. military men. When the press last week reported Western military thinking on the subject, French public opinion promptly registered alarm—though a good deal less than might have been expected. France’s own General de Lattre de Tassigny, head of Western Union’s still largely hypothetical ground forces, was reported favoring a West German army.

The Western generals do not want a German army to be set up now; they do want the Western governments to make the decision that within a specified time—probably two years—it will be set up, so that they can include it in their strategic plans for Western Europe’s defense. In the meantime, they propose through M.A.P. to build up the Atlantic pact nations—particularly the French—so that they will have no reason to fear an armed Germany.

These plans were meeting opposition last week from an unexpected quarter—Germany. Both Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Socialist Opposition Leader Kurt Schumacher have said that they do not want a German army. A public-opinion poll in the new republic showed that 60% of the Western Germans do not want to bear arms. Certainly, it was unrealistic to expect, as some Western military leaders have suggested, that Germans would long bear arms under foreign officers, i.e., under Western Union headquarters. Cried the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine last week: “You cannot buy German military ability for money, white bread and corned beef . . .”

The hard fact remained that if West Germany was to be a nation, as the Western powers and its own people have decided, it would sooner or later have to be armed, and want to be armed. It would be up to the Western powers and to Germany’s own democrats to keep a German army within reasonable bounds and under civilian control; if they could not accomplish that, they would not be able to accomplish very much else in Germany.